From the interview:
Natasha Stagg There does seem to be a common fear of technology and machine learning, though—that it will outsmart you eventually.Urs Fischer Yeah, good. I mean, we’re not that smart to begin with.NS But we’re creating the machine, so we don’t want to be outsmarted by it.UF Our species creates all sorts of things, but look at what else we do: we tap into natural resources like there’s no tomorrow, knowing it’s bad for us as a species and for the rest of life on this planet. But we do it with very elaborate, smart machines. . . . There are a lot of things we do that we don’t want to talk about because we don’t like the solutions. We procreate like crazy, creating more of us, caring about the ones close to us but not about a bigger picture. We just mess everything up. How smart are we? I tend to think that we’re idiots. We’re smart enough to do things but too dumb to understand what we do. The fear of machines outsmarting us, the feeling, the emotional side of this—I don’t think that’s new. The world has always been ending. The apocalypse is as old as history, just with different ingredients.
IMHO, the world has always been ending because our lives are always ending; the apocalypse is personal before it’s collective.
I’m willing to believe that the fear of machines outsmarting us isn’t new either, since it’s human to fear being outsmarted, primarily by other humans and then by anything else that our hyper-active innate agency detectors identify. If the fear is perennial, presumably the optimism is, too.
